Synopsis
Animals and Disease examines the interactions of medicine and veterinary medicine in their common quest for ways of combating and controlling epidemic diseases in man and animals. Emphasis is placed on the study of animal disease itself, and its implications for human medicine, at first empirically, and later by deliberate use of animal models. Following a general introduction, the text is mainly concerned with developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the apparent paradox of the founding of the Brown Institution in London, an institute for comparative medicine, nearly twenty years before similar institutes appeared in France and in Germany, although comparative medicine was studied with much more enthusiasm there than in the British Isles. The rise and fall of the Brown Institute and the subsequent rise of the great institutes of Paris and Berlin is discussed, concluding with the rise at the turn of the century of American institutes for comparative medicine.
From the Back Cover
Man's attempts to learn about aspects of the human body and its functions by observation and study of animals are to be found throughout history, especially at times and in cultures where the human body was considered sacrosanct, even after death. This book describes the origins and later development, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of comparative medicine and its interrelationship with medicine and veterinary medicine and the efforts of its practitioners to understand and control outbreaks of infectious, epidemic diseases in humans and in domestic animals. In the nineteenth century their efforts and increasing professionalism led to the creation of specialised institutes devoted to the study of comparative medicine. Paradoxically the first such institute, the Brown Institution, opened in London in 1871, despite the fact that the study of this branch of medicine in Britain had always lagged behind that in France and Germany. The book discusses the rise and fall of this centre and describes how it was soon overtaken in importance by the great institutes in Paris and Berlin and then, from the turn of the century, by American institutes, funded by private fortunes. This book sheds much new light on the medical and veterinary history of this period and will provide a new perspective on the history of bacteriology.
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